Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique useful when a service using a mechanism such as “Web Intents” is provided.
Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a transfer of processing between websites has required a function calling-side to know how to call a function such as an Application Programming Interface (API) or a Representative State Transfer (REST) interface of a function provider-side. Therefore, the function calling-side has had to perform processing of the calling-side according to each calling rule to realize cooperation with a different website. Further, authentication by the function provider-side is often required to allow the function calling-side to use the function. Therefore, the function user-side has had to store authentication information of the function provider-side or use an authentication foundation such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). However, the storage of the authentication information may lead to the necessity of correctly and safely managing this authentication information, and the use of the authentication foundation such as SAML requires establishment of an agreement in advance between the function provider and the function user. These requirements have imposed a burden on the function user.
For example, conventionally, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2009-199369 has discussed a technique for using a service provided on the Web.
There are also mechanisms that realize cooperation with an arbitrary web service (or a web application) without requiring using a special API. As one example thereof, there is proposed a mechanism called Web Intents that loosely couples a service receiver-side and a service provider-side by late runtime binding to realize cooperation therebetween.
According to the new cooperation mechanism such as the above-described Web Intents mechanism, a user agent (UA) processes a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) document that contains a markup for registering function information of a provided function and registers the function information as a Web Intent to use the provided function offered by a service in this mechanism. The UA can request execution of the provided function by connecting to the service with use of the function information registered in the UA. However, when there is a plurality of relay functions in an information processing terminal, processing for registering the function information is performed for each relay function individually, and the function information is managed for each relay function individually. Therefore, even if certain function information is registered for a certain relay function, this function information cannot be used from the other relay functions. Therefore, a user repeatedly have to perform the registration processing for each relay function even for the same function information, and thus this mechanism is not necessarily sufficiently user-friendly.
Therefore, various refinements to improve the usability will be further demanded, regarding the request to the service with use of this Web Intent and the registration of the Web Intent.